


Battles and Breadcrumbs

by msj24



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: 0408 The Kids, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 22:56:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29500287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msj24/pseuds/msj24
Summary: When BJ and Hawkeye care for the children who escaped a shelling attack, it forces them to consider the kind of story they're really participating in.
Kudos: 5





	Battles and Breadcrumbs

For the millionth time since BJ was unexpectedly thrust into his life, Hawkeye thanked all the gods he didn’t believe in for his presence. He had been through sheltering the orphanage before and couldn’t imagine having to deal with another Frank-like cretin throughout the whole ordeal. 

As usual, BJ took the news with the same concerned but affable way he took most of the news around here. Not asking too many questions, just getting right to work, setting up beds, organizing medical supplies, and prepping for the flood of tiny overnight visitors. 

“Shame you became a surgeon, you would have made a great chambermaid” he cracked from the other side of the swamp as he threw sheets across one of the cots.

Hawkeye felt the tension in his shoulders ease a little as he told BJ about working at the hotel resort to help get through pre-med. He used to be a little embarrassed to tell people that he worked making up beds, but now the memories had a slight haze of soft nostalgia around them, like most of his memories from the time before Korea. 

Their companionable efficiency was broken up by Frank storming in and preceding to be the miserable whine that he was. Hawk was just starting to work up to a truly inspired insult when BJ said, “What’s that on your chest Frank?”

Hawkeye felt the mood shift. BJ’s tone was suddenly dead serious with a kind of underlying steel the Hawkeye hadn’t heard from him before. Hawkeye’s stomach dropped a little.

He followed BJ’s gaze to Frank’s chest and there it was. A purple heart. 

Of course Frank had it. It was amazing the stories Frank told himself about the kind of person he was and the kind of things he deserved. Every time Hawkeye thought Frank had hit the lowest of his expectations, he managed to dive even lower.

“You were never wounded”, Hawkeye said moving into Frank’s personal space. Frank’s face began morphing between arrogance and smugness and nervousness at Hawkeye’s proximity. 

“I was too! Last week during the sniper attack. I got a shell fragment in my eye.”

It was unfathomable. He looked at BJ and saw the same horror and disgust reflected back at him. 

“I was the physician who treated that eye, Frank. It was an eggshell fragment.”

“You were eating breakfast and got nervous.” BJ added bitterly.

“Nevermind! It says shell fragment on my service record,” Frank said without a touch of shame.

Hawkeye started to feel the blood rush to his brain, which was so often the response to Frank’s endless delusions and pitiful sense of self-importance. It was always easier for Frank to claim the bravery and heroics of someone else as his own, without any of the personal sacrifice.   
He was a weak man desperate to be treated like he was strong, and it made Hawkeye want to strangle him with his stethoscope. He grabbed a hold of Frank’s shirt.

“You don’t get medals for other people’s blood, Frank”. He tried to say it in as even a tone as possible. For some reason he didn’t want BJ to see him lose control with Frank. It wasn’t worth it. They would exact revenge later.

“Attention, Attention, all personnel. Wounded in the compound!”

\- - - - - - - 

What he wasn’t prepared for, was the force of remembrance to hit him so hard. When BJ looked at those kids he was back in Mill Valley, in that tiny kitchen warming the bottle over the stove, listening to Peggy singing softly to Erin. Thinking about that was a visceral pain in his chest. He knew his life wasn’t perfect before Korea, but from this vantage point his old life seemed a beautiful fairy tale. He was stuck in a different story now, stumbling around in a dark forest, surrounded by the howling of wolves and ghosts, unable to follow the trail of breadcrumbs back home. 

He forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose, clutching the wooden pole he was leaning against. Suddenly, there was a hand on his shoulder.

He started, but it was just Hawkeye, sounding a little hesitant. “You alright Beej?” 

BJ steeled himself and turned to see Hawkeye’s concerned face. Under the flickering lights he could see the dark circles under his friend’s eyes. He thought about Hawkeye’s reaction to Frank’s purple heart and felt grateful that he wasn’t navigating these woods alone. 

He tried to smile. “Yeah, just haven’t had patients this size for a while.”

Hawkeye nodded, grabbed his elbow and started pulling him toward the mess tent. “It probably is strange to work with humans as big as your feet.”

BJ rolled his eyes and let himself be dragged to the tent. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?”

“Why thank you” Hawkeye said, dramatically tossing his hair out of his face. “Now hurry up, these kids don’t have the quite the same attention span as an unconscious GI.”

They pushed through the doors and were immediately met with chaos. Children running around everywhere screaming and laughing, a frazzled Fr. Mulcahey chased after them, trying fruitlessly to corral them into some kind of order. Frank was having a paranoia tantrum in the corner.

They both looked at each other before bursting out laughing.

“To your station doctor!” Hawkeye said, as he did an exaggerated military march over to one of the areas set up for exams. 

Feeling bolstered by Hawkey’s attitude, BJ moved to the other side of the room, a smile still on his face. He could do this.

He felt himself warming up to the task after the first few kids. They were dirty and their clothes were hanging on by a few worn down threads, but they were still kids. Some shy and nervous, others boisterous and loud. He tried to give himself over to the task; forget the little girl he left behind and focus on the ones who needed him here.

Colonel Potter had made his way over and was talking to Nurse Cratty. 

“How’d he lose his leg?” he asked in a low tone indicating the kid in front of her.

“They pick up shells to sell for brass,” Nurse Cratty said matter-of-factly, “Sometimes they catch a live one.”

BJ felt white hot rage lick his insides and took a shuddering breath. He locked eyes with the girl in front of him. Her eyes were afraid. He forced his body to relax and tried to give her a warm, safe smile. Over her shoulder he saw Hakeye and the boy he was examining curling their tongues at each other.

“Alright sweetheart can you say ‘ahh’ for me?”. He stretched his mouth open demonstrating for her and she started to giggle. He leaned into it, sticking his tongue out all the way, changing his ‘ahh’ into a silly tune while the little girl giggled even harder. She reached out, trying to close his mouth and he snapped it shut like a spring, stumbling back a few steps. A few of the other kids in line were starting to laugh at him too. Pleased, he looked over to Hawkeye who was busy listening to a little boy’s chest. That’s okay, he thought, he’d tell him about it later. Probably when they got to scheming how to repurpose Frank’s purple heart, which BJ was certain Hawkeye was already planning. He didn’t seem like the kind of man to let hypocrisy lie.   
\- - - - - - - 

After looking over all the children, Hawkeye was bone tired and desperately in need of a stiff drink. But there was still work to do and he tried to rally as he and BJ carried a few of the boys back to the Swamp. 

He had been worried about BJ. Sometimes reminders of home seemed like they might help but really they were just a gut punch reminder of what you couldn’t have. Hawkeye had peeked over at BJ in the mess tent a few times and knew he shouldn’t have worried. BJ was a natural, smiling and laughing with the kids. 

After a few minutes spent arguing over who was going to tell the bedtime story, and a cathartic shot at Frank, BJ finally acquiesced. 

It was a good thing he did because BJ clearly had a knack for this. For the first time in a long time, Hawkeye felt the dark and ugly world around him melt away a little. BJ was giving the story his all, adding voices and facial expressions to the twists and turns in the story. Hawkeye didn’t know if he could ever tell a story like that. Without a trace of sarcasm or an incoming punchline. A faint memory of his dad sitting in his armchair in front of a fire, reading aloud to him started to surface. Hawkeye felt his chest expand and found himself smiling softly at BJ. 

But as soon as the kids had fallen asleep, BJ stopped, turning to Hawkeye with a bemused smile. 

“They’re asleep.”

“Yeah, so?

“So what?”

“You’re not going to finish?”

BJ could laugh all he wanted, but Hawkeye was too tired to feign indifference. With the way things were going, he didn’t want to miss a single happy ending, no matter what form it came in.

\- - - - - - - 

BJ couldn’t fall asleep. He kept thinking about the kid who had lost his leg. How was it fair that these kids ended up in the nightmare of war while his daughter slept peacefully back in Mill Valley? Would the kids here ever know the kind of safety Erin was born into? His thoughts made him hate his presence here even more. He wasn’t helping change anything. Everyday was an ugly exhausting battle trying to stop an endless tide over which he had no control. 

He slipped into fitful sleep, visions of idyllic family picnics transforming into minefields and cozy nights around the fireplace distorting into operating tables. Each story ending with blood and looking into Peg’s terrified eyes with no answers. 

“Captain Hunicutt! Captain Pierce! Wake up sirs! The pregnant lady’s been shot!!” BJ shot up sweating all over, totally confused. He saw Hawkeye throwing his robe on and reality came crashing back into him. He tried to put the shattered fragments of his mind back together and stumbled after Hawkeye. 

Once they made it to OR and saw how desperate the situation was, Hawkeye immediately offered up BJ as the closest expert.

BJ felt his chest constricting as Hawkeye’s nimble fingers tied up his mask. Hawkeye had such faith in him that BJ tried to smother the memory of throwing up from nerves before performing his first Cesarean. The operation had been successful but the pressure of two lives in his hands hadn’t changed. He couldn’t let this mother and baby down. This wasn’t going to be the end of their story. 

The rumble of commotion and chaos carries on around him, but BJ doesn’t hear it. The world had shrunk to just him, this mother, and this child. Blood and bone and bullets. Nothing else. 

He was so close. Hawkeye had finished with his patient and hovered next to BJ, unusually quiet, letting BJ work. 

At the first sharp cry of the baby, BJ tried and failed to suppress a huge sigh of relief. He felt tears prick the corners of his eyes. They were going to live. There were a few moments of stunned silence before spontaneous cheering broke out in the operating room, so unaccustomed was everyone to the sounds of new life. 

“Nice work doctor.” Hawkeye said smiling. He leaned over to talk into BJ’s ear. Through the exhilaration, BJ felt his warm breath on his neck, his sweaty shoulder leaning against his own. “You know what every baby deserves on their birthday?”

BJ turned to look at him, their faces inches from each other. Hawkeye looked devious and triumphant. 

“A purple heart.”

Perfect. 

\- - - - - - - 

After an excruciating ten minutes watching Frank parade in front of the mirror with his Purple Heart before lovingly placing it back in his footlocker and leaving the Swamp, Hawkeye snuck in with BJ and liberated the medal. Before they left, Hawkeye couldn’t help but perform an exaggerated parody of Frank with his medal while BJ died of laughter. Coping with Frank was so much more fun with a willing audience. Trapper had been good at that too. Briefly Hawkeye wondered if Trapper and BJ would have been friends. Thinking about the two existing in the same space was too strange so he let it go. 

On the way over to postop, BJ talked about how nice it was to be around kids again, even just for a little while. “I was worried I might have lost my touch”, he said in a way that Hawkeye was sure he intended to sound light but mostly sounded anxious.

“Don’t worry BJ,” Hawkeye said, “When you go home, you’ll slip right in like you never left”. 

Like a returned library book, he thought, filling its empty spot on the shelf. He felt his good mood starting to wilt. He tried to imagine how Trapper had returned to his old life. If he had slid right back into his life, his job, his wife and kids the same as he was before. Hawkeye knew he would never fit back in the spot he had left. He wouldn’t fit on the shelf anymore. This war was rewriting him completely.

He could feel BJ looking at him with concern and pasted his patented ‘devious Hawkeye’ face back on as he patted the purple heart case in his pocket. 

After informing the Colonel of their plans, Potter shook his head, heaved a deep sigh and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like ‘17 months, 14 days, 4 hours’, before filling out the paperwork just as Hawkeye knew he would. As thoroughly different as Henry and Potter were, they were both huge softies. And like any rational human, they both hated Burns.

At the improvised ceremony, the mother looked confused but too tired to really care all that much. And as much as he enjoyed watching BJ force Frank to witness this moment, when he looked at the love on her face as she cradled her child, he felt a little silly. They were so wrapped up in each other. A love story unto themselves. If there was still space in this war for a mother’s love, he thought, there must still be space for peace. 

His heart had a hard time hanging onto that feeling though. He may have won this battle with Frank, but he was still losing the war against the war. They all were. And no amount of scheming on his part was going to change that. Scheming didn’t give Sung Lee a roof over her head or feed her new baby. It certainly didn’t get him back to Crab Apple Cove or Erin back in BJ’s arms. It was a momentary ease in the pain and grief.

Lost in his own dark thoughts, Hawkeye didn’t hear BJ until he was right on top of him. “Did you see his face Hawk? His stupid ferret face?!” BJ’s long arm wrapped around Hawkeye’s shoulders, the other gesturing wildly. He looked so pleased that Hawkeye couldn’t help but play along, wrapping his arm around BJ’s waist as they walked back to the Swamp. 

“You did good BJ”.

“We did good.” BJ said, a satisfied smile on his face. 

Hawkeye tried not to think anymore about whether or not that was true.

Once they were back at the Swamp, BJ flopped onto his cot and let out a contented sigh, unconcerned about his blood and dirt caked boots on the bed. He grinned over at Hawkeye, his blue eyes bright, stubble all over his face. 

And just for a moment, before he drifted off to sleep, Hawkeye let himself really look at BJ and allowed the tiniest sliver of hope to enter his chest. It might be a losing battle, but at least he was never fighting alone.


End file.
